Time Well Lost
by Dark Manifest
Summary: No matter how far you go, some roads will always double back on you. Trish x Dante


**All disclaimers apply.**

_**010. Years:**__ No matter how far you go, some roads will always double back on you._

Tempus edax rerum.

(Time is the devourer of things)

* * *

_"Well," said one._

_"Yes," said the other._

_Countless things to say, and none of them appropriate._

_A long pause, awkward, then the first decided to take the plunge. "This is an unexpected turn of events."_

_The other raised an eyebrow. "Humans have turned understatement into an art."_

_"Is that all you've got to say about us, after all of this time?"_

_"It's the only thing that's universal about you. That, and heartbeats."_

_Laughter, light and sincere. "I suppose."_

_Another pause, this one longer than the previous._

_Trish, ancient, now, tired but more human than she was centuries ago, was the first to turn away. "They both died well," she said simply. "Better than most."_

_"A difficult act to follow, I'm sure," said the one once called Eva, young and new, as enigmatic as ever. A different body, yes, but an old soul, and that was all that mattered,_

_Trish glanced over, matching blue gaze to blue. A thousand years or more, it didn't matter. Her soul would never quite have that fire._

_She nodded. "Yes. Some are."_

* * *

Trish didn't expect it, but really, like most of the things she didn't see coming, it was obvious. That it took so long is the real surprise.

"You remember," she observes over tea and croissants. It's almost absurd, the little bistro in a city once known as Paris, one of the few that still indulges in classical things. Absurd, yet appropriate: an outdated place for outdated people.

The woman shrugs and looks up with her sphinx's eyes, so incongruous with her young form that has yet to experience anything of substance. "It comes in bits and pieces. I think I've had a dozen lives since. Some stand out more than others."

They're almost similar, but not quite. They could barely pass as distant relatives, now - the woman's hair is too dark, closer to red, and short; she's not as tall; her eyes are slightly off in color, blue, but not the blue that Trish has and has always had. No, no one would confuse the two of them anymore. But it's a strange quality that links them. The same quality that turned a random passing on a smoke-filled street into...this. Whatever it is.

The human drinks her tea and the demon lets hers chill. It's been too long, nothing has taste anymore. A casualty of time, to be able to appreciate something as simple as flavor and texture.

Trish sighs, looking out the window to her right. People pass in an indistinct stream, so strange, always strange, because they're always changing and she never is.

"I didn't think I would live this long," she says softly.

"Life deals out uneven hands." The woman sets down her cup with a light clink. "You take what you can get."

"Too bad you can't give any of it away."

"Yes." The woman's voice has the same quality of sadness, of loss, like a child who can't find her way and has given up trying. "Too bad."

The woman has a name, now, and it isn't Eva. She has a family, and there isn't either a devil knight or a set of twins in it. Just a brother, a mother and father, a sister-in-law, two nieces. She has pictures, kept on an old-fashioned digital booklet, she shows them to Trish. Against her better judgment, Trish looks. Against her better sense, she cares.

How many times before has this woman had a family? How many times has she woken up to remember the times she had a family, the times she didn't, the one time out of the lot that Trish appears in that endless slideshow of birth and death and gain and loss?

Trish doesn't know whether to envy or pity her. At the end of the day, however, she decides a thousand different lives is still better than the same, eternal. But maybe the grass just looks greener. Really, she'll never be human enough to understand the downsides that come with it.

But still, she's seen a lot of the world. She's seen enough to study history texts and pick out all of the many discrepancies, seen enough to see things repeated, dusted off and polished in order to look new, but essentially the same thing underneath, over and over and over again. It's a cycle, emergence, pinnacle, decline, and the only way that cycle can progress is if people forget most of what they've learned.

She looks at what used to be Eva, tells her, "You're screwing up the process." She's speaking for the both of them.

The woman smiles. It's eerie, because it's the exact smile Trish remembers so clearly, sitting on a cluttered desk in a dim office, captured in a faded photograph. So long ago.

"Perhaps," Eva-Not-Eva replies. "But you move on."

* * *

The woman leaves eventually, returning to her life, back into the world that even for one as unusual as she, is still her world, and her place.

The demon stays where she is, not taking a step in any direction, watching one human among many humans until there's nothing left to see.

* * *

There are others, of course. Where there are demons, there are hunters. The one would not be to able, apparently, to outlive the other. And the side she's chosen has a lot to learn no matter how many millennia the war rages on.

Trish isn't sentimental enough to be a loner. Or maybe she just isn't brave enough. Bravery was something for people who had noble reasons to fight. She just does it because without it, there's nothing left to do. And sitting still for eternity just makes it even longer.

The hunters, and exorcists, and alchemists, and witches, all with different talents given to the same cause, they start blurring together, becoming a mass that, despite having her attention, didn't have even a fraction of her time. The only thing that linked them was their passion. They believed in something. They were willing to live for it, die for it. They cared.

_I cared_, she thinks, sitting where she's most comfortable, high on the ledge of a building, just one of many structures in this time that rival that of the legendary towers said to reach heaven. Above it all, looking down. Everything seems so small from up here. Everyone, so faceless. Just one of the horde.

"Son of Sparda?" one said, some cigar-chomping ex-military man. Long dead and she's already forgotten his name. "Never heard of him."

"Them." Trish didn't know why she bothered, still doesn't, but it's a mortal habit she picked up, never learning her lesson. "There were two. Dante and Vergil?"

"I dunno. Wasn't that in some book? The Divine something or other?"

She really doesn't know why she bothers at all.

"I _care_," she says aloud, trying to have conviction and not even able to muster that.

Even if she doesn't, she will pretend just a little longer for them. For him.

Most of it is for him.

* * *

_Dante, he liked to say - during one of his rare moods when he decided to wax philosophic, usually over alcohol and long after dark - that it wasn't about doing what was right, just doing what had to be done. What other people couldn't do._

_"So because I can means I should?" she challenged, and he smirked._

_"Why not? You can do anything. So why not this? Give me one good reason."_

_"Spending time with you, for one. You're why people opt for suicide."_

_She didn't say it then, she rarely ever did, but he was her reason to bother. He was her family, her ties to this world._

* * *

How long has it been? A hundred years, five?

* * *

She didn't lie to Eva. He did die well, both he and his brother, as well as could be expected, fighting all the way.

That isn't the image Trish has of Dante in her head, though. Not of him broken beyond all repair, clawed hands and armored chest but too-human eyes with all of its hurts, all of its defiance. Spitting crimson, stained sword in hand, smiling into the face of annihilation for the last time. What remained of him in the aftermath, unmoving in her arms, no profound last words, no clever quip for the history texts that would forget him moments later, anyway.

No, she doesn't dwell on that. There are countless memories like that, only that one is the last, that is the only one where there was no coming back.

What she remembers, wants to hold closest, are those early years, when he was still an upstart on a mission, the antihero for the masses who would sooner have stoned him dead than admit they needed him. And that was fine, too, let them hate him, it wasn't _for_ them, anyway. Only a human could be a savior even when no one asked him to, did everything to repel him - or perhaps that's a trait shared by devils, as well. The two kinds aren't so different, to be contrary, tenacious. Don't stop until you're stopped. That was the motto.

Those were the best times, before the cynicism and the disappointment set in, so deep that no amount of digging could remove it. Before he grew older, gray, let his hair trail down his back and human contact trail away, as strong as he had been in his youth but no longer as passionate, no longer so driven to do something as simple as save the world.

* * *

_When that last battle was over, long after Temen-ni-gru, after Mallet, after Dumary, after Fortuna, after everything, he burned his brother's body on a funeral pyre built by his own hands. Human hands. "It's something I have to do," he told her, and wouldn't let her help, even though every movement made him shake with pain, as much physical as emotional. As ever, Vergil left his mark. All scars faded, but some never went away - even when you couldn't see them anymore._

_They watched the unnatural flames lick the air, blue and white, burning so completely in a way mortal flames never could. At the last minute, he tossed both swords into the fire, Yamato and Rebellion, their father's legacy become their burden, and now merely payment for the ferryman to carry a lost soul across the river._

_When the final ember died, he said, "I guess, at the end of it, you're supposed to have a better reason than just because."_

_She didn't know what she was supposed to say. Something meaningful, something soothing, nothing at all? "Maybe," was the best she had._

_After that, he stopped trying._

_And on Dante's pyre, Trish placed a sword, as well, and the amulet that went with it. Things that had survived the eons burned with him._

_What was the point of being ancient when you had no purpose?_

* * *

It takes her centuries to learn that lesson.

* * *

So, one day, when Trish nearly mows down a kid on her hybrid bike, and his eyes are a memory that cuts deep, she isn't surprised. She doesn't know how to be, anymore.

"Whoa, slow down, babe," he says, stomping out his cigarette on the concrete. "You're not in so much of a hurry to get where you're going that you need to run me over to do it."

"I'm not going anywhere," she says faintly.

He looks her up and down, smirks in a way so familiar, but so alien, like the sound of her own voice from somewhere far away. "Nowhere, huh? So you mind going my way?"

Her hands tighten around the handlebars until she can feel her fingers breaking, one by one.

And she says, "Sure. Why not?"

Trish doesn't have the heart to tell him that his way is the one way she wishes she could leave behind more than anything else.

* * *

It isn't what you would call looking at a ghost. More like a bad dream. Ghosts, at least, have the decency to stay dead, but it's the nightmares that never stop coming back.

Young, no longer a child but not a man, hair so pale a blond it borders on white, but only almost. His smile, hard and slightly mocking, as if he finds everything so tragic that it's funny. His eyes, still blue, still laughing, so interested, so ready to live, not centuries old and ready to give up, give way, let the monsters win because they had already won his soul.

And of course he isn't named after an Italian poet and doesn't have a twin, he's never touched a sword or fired a gun, he wouldn't know a devil if it hit him, if he fucked it and even spent the rest of his life with it. But how much did anyone know about the one they loved? How much of what she thought she loved in him was just echoes of a mother for a son, and vice versa, a son's love for his mother? How much of any of it was real?

Not knowing whose soul this used to belong to would make it a lot easier. But then she wouldn't want him to begin with. That's her own hypocrisy and she has to live with it.

She hates him for not being the person he should.

Even more, she hates herself for not being able to walk away.

* * *

The worst part is when he touches her, kisses her, because she lets him, and she can't even pretend anymore, though she doesn't stop it from happening, over and over again. So many times she comes close to breaking him in two, and _he_ would have let her try, the old Dante who took punishment and laughed, claimed it was the best part of everything with her, that she never held back. This one would, too, because for some reason he thinks he loves her. And maybe that's really the worst part, that they both know some things don't go both ways.

"It's just that you remind me of someone I knew," she tells him. "A long time ago."

"Yeah?" He pretends to look at the horizon, mostly because he doesn't want to look at her. "That's not really fair."

"No. But you take what you can get."

She holds him when he comes, comforts him when he's alone, snaps at him when he's a fool and smiles with him when he's so happy with just being alive that he can't hold it back.

Fucking a memory, that's what it is. Barely that anymore, slowly becoming an idea, a concept. Too much time, and along with taste, and touch, and mercy, she's not sure she even remembers what it's supposed to be like. She's going through the motions, acting out a part, but the script's been burned and the props keep changing and the actors are all replacements because the originals won't stop dying.

* * *

So long ago, he told her it was possible to look back and laugh.

Would he laugh, now?

No. There's not enough of the original in him to get the joke.

* * *

Later, it isn't an accident that she finds him. She wasn't looking, but Trish doesn't believe in coincidences anymore.

A thieving murderer, a careless driver, a slip and fall, a demon, even, how it happened doesn't really matter. Everything is lethal to these humans - breathing, walking, loving, it all leads to this. _The high cost of living is death, after all_, she thinks, and scoffs. The true cost of living, she's learned, is time, of which death is just a consequence.

Ruined skin and splintered bones, blood seeping red and black into cold ground. Now, more than ever, she recognizes his face, because it's her worst fear set on rewind and playback, again and again. His eyes staring, always staring, looking beyond this, this farce, this fucking joke spiraling down into nothing. Something from his old life, maybe, before his mortal half killed him.

Just a child, really. Here she is, losing her child once more.

She sits down beside him, arms on her knees, tired enough to never move again. The smell of his blood is like an old friend.

_He said that she was right, that the sky was as beautiful as she'd said, that he was sorry he'd never really appreciated it before._

He always has to die going forward, looking up, moving on. Even dead, he's a stronger person than she is.

Must be a human thing.

"Sorry." Quietly, just loud enough for the dead to hear, if the dead are listening.

Sorry that she could never save him from being human, and that no matter how she tried, she never would be.

* * *

His body burns much more quickly this time.

* * *

In the long run, she supposes there has to be a point to it all.

In the longer run, though, maybe the point is that there isn't a point. That everything just is because it is. Like the god she's never seen, or the world that can never quite seem to bring itself to end. She'll keep saving it anyway, though. Because that's what _he_ would do.

But what would _she_ do, if she had enough of herself to wonder? If it all stood still, and she wouldn't have to keep losing him? If she didn't have to keep trying because he no longer could?

If, if, if.

If she could face the truth behind the nightmare, maybe she could stop living it.

The real problem with being a copy is that she never did figure out what she was supposed to become.

* * *

_"I guess you can move on," Trish told the woman who was and wasn't Eva, was and wasn't herself, right before they parted ways for the first and last time. "But going forward doesn't mean you won't end up right back where you started."_

* * *

Time passes. It's the one thing she has in abundance, the one thing she can never lose.

So she clings to it, and thinks of it as all she'll ever really have.


End file.
